The doors of God they have locked with keys of
creed
And shut out by the Law his tireless Grace.
(Savitri, p. 225)
What
is Religion?
The
word ‘religion’ has so many different connotations that it is impossible to
give a precise definition. Theologians, philosophers, anthropologists,
historians and atheists have all tried to define it variously according to
their expertise and view points. I am not competent to review all these definitions,
and I think that for our purpose such a comprehensive review is not
necessary. All definitions are
formulated with words which themselves need definitions. As soon as we leave
the field of the material our language becomes incapable of providing us with
clear-cut concepts and meanings.
Almost
all definitions of religion speak of the belief in some supernatural being or
power, in something that appears to be sacred or divine. The origin of such a
belief may be the fear of the pre-scientific man facing the devastating nature
which he did not understand and which was all-powerful, or it may be, as in the
organized religions, belief in the revelation of some superhuman mystery. In
all cases the central concept is belief. And belief, as it is ordinarily
understood, is not founded on personal experience or experimentation. It is
mostly the result of indoctrination, the handing down of traditional lore of
which the veracity is unquestioned and unquestionable. For the critics of
religious beliefs this attitude is irrational. But believers themselves defend
their attitude by saying that reason is an uncertain means of knowledge: there
is an insight greater than reason which can discover truths that reason is
incapable of knowing; the supernatural power or being uses seers and prophets possessing
such insights to reveal itself to the ignorant humans. On hearing such
statements the critic will immediately point out that there is here a second
belief—belief in the words of the seer and the prophet.
Belief
thus remains the mainstay of a religious man. Bertrand Russell, a great
rationalistic critic of religion defines religion as “a set of beliefs held as
dogmas, dominating the conduct of life, going beyond or contrary to evidence,
and inculcated by methods which are emotional or authoritarian, not
intellectual.” [1] Belief has a tremendous influence on the life and action of
the religious man. Accepting, even if it be irrationally, the existence of
transcendence or an absolute reality, he adopts an attitude in which he feels
himself humble, ignorant and powerless to give meaning to life independently of
the transcendence. And this attitude becomes extremely debilitating when
religious scriptures and authorities he believes in, suggest that he is a
sinner not by anything that he has done but by the very fact of his being born.
He has no freedom of conduct, no freedom of thought, and finally often he has
no freedom of belief: he believes, as he has been taught, in the religion that
he is born in or that has been imposed upon him. And this leads him inevitably
to regard the beliefs of others not belonging to his own creed as false which
have to be replaced by ‘the only true belief’ or eradicated: this is a ‘noble’
act for saving the souls of those who have not seen the light.
We
don’t need to look back in time or far from home in order to see the justness
of the above description. Fortunately, religion has also other meanings and
ideals. Man, conscious sometimes of his imperfection, and more or less free
from received ideas, who dared to ask questions to find out the meaning of
existence, conceived a perfect supreme state of existence.
What
is this supreme state? “His ideas of the supreme state,” Sri Aurobindo says, “is
an absolute of all that is positive to his own concepts and desirable to his
own instinctive aspiration—Knowledge without its negative shadow of error,
Bliss without its negation in experience of suffering, Power without its
constant denial by incapacity, purity and plenitude of being without the opposing
sense of defect and limitation. It is so that he conceives his gods; it is so
that he constructs his heavens... His dream of God and Heaven is really a dream
of his own perfection.” [2] The highest idea of religion as it has developed is
indeed the idea of a supreme state. This idea is however a mental one. Man sees
in himself and in others the simultaneous existence of opposite forces—good and
evil, truth and falsehood, love and aggressiveness—and instinctively tries to
valorise what seems to him positive, what would give his life a higher value
and significance. And the absolute valorisation of his positive thoughts and
desires becomes his religious ideal. But the absolute that he conceives has for
its basic state his concepts and his instinctive aspiration. Now, concept is a
mental formulation—to conceive is to ‘devise in the mind’. The absoluteness of
this mental device remains mental. Likewise his instinctive aspirations arise
from the vital impulse of survival and self-preservation. The ideal he formulates
is mental, yet there is a metaphysical sublimity: he dreams of a state, above
and beyond his actual existential state, in which the defects and impurities of
actual knowledge, happiness and power are eliminated.
This
conceptual state is the foundation of man’s religious sentiment. This mental absoluteness
is the quality that he attributes to gods he ‘conceives’, the heavens of bliss
he ‘constructs’. The verbs ‘conceive’ and ‘construct’ suggest that gods and
heavens are thought out, made by man out of his vital feelings and mental
thinking. Therefore we may conclude that God or Heaven as conceived by man is
not a real reality. They are of the stuff that dreams are made of. Religion is
therefore founded on ideas and beliefs that cannot be taken as a sure basis of
man’s dream of self-perfection, although we should accept that there is in man
this yearning towards a higher existence. In spite of much that is partial,
imperfect, vain and unreal in religion, it is the human aspiration that has
made it possible for religions to survive.
In
the context of the Realistic Adwaita, the premise on which the fulfilment of
man’s dream of perfect knowledge, bliss and power is founded is not belief,
which is an unquestioning acceptance of some mentally or instinctively
conceived God-hypothesis, but ‘aspiration’. This aspiration is not the
biological instinct of survival but “the impulse towards perfection, the search
after pure Truth and unmixed Bliss, the sense of a secret immortality”. [3]
This aspiration (ākūti) has its source neither in the mind nor in instinctive animal consciousness, but in the heart (hŗdaya). A Vedic seer-poet says that śraddhā comes through the heart’s aspiration. [4] This word śraddhā is generally translated as ‘faith’, but this is not a religious belief, it is the spontaneous spiritual soul-knowledge. True faith cannot be imposed. “Faith,” Sri Aurobindo writes, “is indispensable to man, for without it he could not proceed forward in his journey through the Unknown; but it ought not to be imposed, it should come as a free perception or an imperative direction from the inner spirit.” [5] What the Vedic poet calls ‘heart’ is this inner spirit. But this should not be confused with religious faith. This faith comes as a free vision of the Real: the seer ‘sees’ the truth even before he knows what it is.
Religious
faith, especially faith as taught in the monotheistic religions, has no scope
for ‘free’ perception. The believer is enjoined to accept the ‘revealed’ truths
recorded in the Book. Anyone who tries freely to discover the highest
truth by himself, not blindly following the revelation is condemned as a heretic—it
is a great error, it is said, to venture to know God by oneself, through one’s
personal effort, aspiration and intuition.
Besides
belief or faith in some supernatural agency there is also in religion the
belief in two kinds of fixed rules of conduct—ritualistic and ethical. Every religion prescribes laws of worship and
commandments. This belief in the rules of conduct does not come from true faith
(śraddhā); these rules too are imposed. Action and conduct should come
as “an imperative direction from the inner self.” However, ritualistic and
moral religious conduct is prescribed by men [6]—members of the privileged
social classes—who did not have the true perception, who were at best motivated
by the existing moral practices and at the worst by desires to have the
‘divine’ sanction to keep the people down and use them for profit and dominion.
In
spite of the imperfections and limitations of religious faith there is in all
religions a necessary element of evolutionary truth, without which religion
could not develop or survive. What is this necessary element? Religion is one
of the evolutionary urges in nature to manifest higher and newer expressions of
Consciousness-Force, that is to say, of true knowledge and true power on earth.
The ideal that the Realistic Adwaita holds forth is the divinisation of man—transformation
and evolution of human life—a life of dynamic harmony with other creatures and
with the universal nature. This is a spiritual living in a transformed physical
vital and mental environment: this spirituality does not reject the world and
the evolutionary potentialities.
The
religious mind had envisaged darkly the spiritual possibility, and in spite of
the debilitating dogmas, creeds and practices, helped some men to attain
individually to a higher and eternal state—a heaven of beatitude, a nirvana or an
extraterrestrial liberation. And religious teaching has produced throughout
history good men, ethical men, pious and charitable men. Such achievements were
admirable, but each religion as a whole has been defective. The faults of
religion, Sri Aurobindo says, “were those of a certain narrowness and exclusive
vision. Concentrated, intense in their ideal and intensive in their effect,
their expansive influence on the human mind was small.” [7] The religious man
was often intolerant and refused to see that the basic spiritual ideal – even
if the formal dogmas and credal expressions of religions other than the one he
professed were different—had a common or similar inspiration and spiritual
impulse. This exclusive attitude, especially of the world’s three monotheistic
religions, resulted in the rejection of the ‘others’, the non-believers. Those
who did not belong to one’s own fold, or did not abandon their beliefs and
practices and enter into the fold, had hardly any right to live.
Religions
that have risen in
This
is a great ideal that envisages a vast horizontal expansion of faith, and the
tolerant recognition of all the various forms of beliefs and practices.
But
as yet there is no sure method of realizing this ideal. It is still like the
ideal of the United Nations, a mental idea, and has all the drawbacks of such
an idea. As long as we remain in the intellectually idealistic realm of thought
we can at best attain a certain modus
vivendi in which there would be tolerance, solidarity, mutual help and
collaboration but which would always be marred by the shadow of intolerance and
violence. It is only when we can rise vertically to a higher dimension, above
the mental ideal that we can expect the universal harmony. Nevertheless
Vivekananda has caught in essence the fulfilment of the spiritual destiny of
the world that the religions have vaguely dreamed of. The fulfilment will be reached
when humanity will realize “its true divine nature”. We will see later what the
realization of humanity’s true divine nature implies in the vision of the Realistic
Adwaita.
Religion
has been a necessary, though defective step towards a higher spirituality. The
religious instinct in man has been a hint of something greater, nobler and more
perfect than our ordinary mental and sub-mental existence. But the instinctive
perception has naturally been partial. With the progress of civilisation the
thinking man became aware of what was defective, ignorant and savage in the
natural instinctive religious practices and tried to correct them with higher
moral values and a greater sense of the Spirit. Yet the truth remained hidden.
People of different regions with different historical and cultural developments
produced different forms of worship and ethical codes which were imposed on man
as eternal and only true on the ground of fear and blind faith.
Historically,
no religion, even the most formal, has remained completely static through time.
There have been modifications, reforms, schisms and imposition of new practices
and views. In spite of all such changes there has hardly ever been any
collective vision of true spirituality. Individually, mystics in all religions
have freed themselves from imposed creeds and dogmas and have sought their own
personal salvation. Sometimes their experiences have added new elements to
religions, sometimes they were rejected as heretical and anti-religious.
The
real truth-element of religions is the vision of the Spirit. When the vision is
clear and luminous, when the religious man lives by that vision the evolutionary
purpose is best served. “True religion,” Sri Aurobindo says, “is spiritual
religion which seeks to live in the spirit, in what is beyond the intellect,
beyond the aesthetic and ethical and practical being of man, and to inform and
govern these members of our being by the higher light and law of the spirit.”
[9] The mind, as yet the highest faculty of knowledge, cannot hold the higher
light to illumine man’s life—the claims of his vital being, his desire-soul and
his ego-self do not admit this light—and make him live and act by the laws of
the spirit. The most that it can do is to press home the ethical, to use the
partial spiritual vision in order to enforce the ethical virtue as absolute “and
to impart a greater authority than life allows to the ethical ideal of right
and truth of conduct on the psychic ideal of love and sympathy and oneness.”
[10] Unfortunately, even this is not often realized. The spiritual insight
degenerates into ‘religionism’, into a mechanical pietism, even mortification
and repressions of the physical and vital parts of the being or “lays exclusive
stress on intellectual dogmas, forms and ceremonies, or some fixed and rigid
moral code, on some religio-political or religio-social system.” [11]
In
the spiritual purpose of evolution, religion plays, albeit blindly, a definite
and needful part. The human intellect has recognized that there is a basic
oneness of the multiple forms in the world. It has thus proclaimed the ideal of
fraternity and unity. This is a cosmic vision. Religion, on the other hand, has
got some inkling of a transcendent oneness. When we look behind the credal,
ritualistic and dogmatic differences we see that “all express one Truth in
various ways and move by various paths to one goal.” [12] The one goal lies,
however, beyond religion. When religions will not only be universalized and
tolerant, but will be fully spiritualized, they will have done their
evolutionary work. Religion, in the vision of the Realistic Adwaita, must
become a luminous and unified expression of the one spirit.
[1]
Bertrand Russell, The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism, London 1920, p.
117
[2]
The Life Divine, Vol. 18,
pp. 55-56
[3] Ibid.,
p. 1
[4]
Rigveda, X.151.4
[5]
The Life Divine, p. 864
[6]
Manu, the Indian law-giver, says: ācārah paramo dharmah (I. 108)
[7]
“Materialism”, Vol. 16, p. 249
[8]
Vivekananda, “Address at the Parliament of Religions”, Complete
Works, Mayavati Memorial Edition, Calcutta 1977; Vol. I, p. 9
[9] The Human Cycle,
Vol. 15, p. 166
[10]
Essays on the Gita, Vol. 13,
p. 548
[11]
The Human Cycle, pp.
166-167
[12]
Isha Upanishad, Vol. 12,
p. 98